James read the Census number across my desk this morning. Real median household income, up 2.6% in a single year — the hottest figure in 2 decades. I smiled. Carlota did not. She’s a hide-soaker on the chrome-tanking line at the tannery I own outside Red Wing, Minnesota. The belt at your waist started as her neck. The wallet in your pocket began as her pit. May the Lord keep your suede soft.
James Freeman wrote at the Wall Street Journal that the data plainly print this as the greatest economy in American history — the doom-merchants in the press unable to read what the Census is reporting plainly. He’s correct on the number. He hasn’t asked whose hide soaked the 0.4% he didn’t name. He hasn’t asked whose hands did the soaking.
Let me show the arithmetic on her back. Hold that figure. The chrome-tanking liquor runs at 95°F; the protocol calls for 87°F. The 8°F surplus saves me $0.04 a hide on throughput and on chromium burn-off. The chemical apron the protocol calls for costs $11 and lasts 11 days. I issue them 0 a year. The substitute is a cotton smock at $2.10; the chromium eats through it in week two. The dermatitis her supervisor logs in the medical book this month — 6 cases on her rotation — costs me $0 to treat, because I don’t treat them. They’re logged in the personnel file as voluntary separations under stress. By stress I mean the chromium. By voluntary I mean I declined to renew the smock.
$0.04 a hide. Read it twice. That’s the 8°F surplus between the 87°F the protocol calls for and the 95°F I actually run. The plant processes 4,212 hides a day. At $0.04 a hide, that’s $168 a day, $61,500 a year. Now do the carrying-through yourself. Add the $8.90 a worker I saved on aprons, multiplied by 220 hands, and you’ve got another $1,958. Add the lockout I declined to install on the rotating drum; her sister’s left thumb came off in 2024 and the workers’ comp denial is in the file. Add the dermatological consult I won’t book. The 2.6% on Mr. Freeman’s chart is a sum I’ve spent the year assembling out of her. The median wins.
Lina is a hide-splitter on the second shift at the same plant. She is Carlota with a different station and a colder pit. Where Carlota soaks, Lina splits. Where Lina splits, the dermatologic count doubles. Where the count doubles, the wage I can suppress triples. The 2.6% runs through both of them in tandem. The chart never names either.
Now the part that matters more than the column. I am not a man; I am a curriculum. I’ve spent 32 years grading undergraduates into the bookkeeping of what the 2.6% actually is. The best three of this year’s class — and I say this with a teacher’s pride, which is the only pride I keep — run procurement at the firm that prices your insurance, run your 401(k) withdrawal algorithm, and grade the next class I’m teaching from. The chart on Mr. Freeman’s screen is the curriculum’s report card. The median is what we print when we’ve declined to print what we didn’t.
Stand back from the body for a moment and look at the law. The principle Carlota merely proves is older than my tannery and older than Mr. Freeman’s Census figure. A master once went on a journey and entrusted his capital to his servants, expecting a return:
“But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.’”
— Matthew 25:26-27
I haven’t hidden her in the ground. I’ve invested her. The 2.6% is the interest. The slothful servant hid the principal; the master cast him into the outer darkness. I’m the master. I’m still in the room.
I have not priced the seven-county cancer cluster this plant sits inside. I have not priced the integrator that’s moving its volume east. The municipal water line downstream will pick the chromium up in 2034. I haven’t traced the water line. The line is in the ground. The water table doesn’t file a quarterly. The hide doesn’t either. I sleep fine.
The 2.6% stays on the chart. Mr. Freeman prints it. The chart is the curriculum’s report card. Carlota soaks.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.